Category: Zombie and Robot

After completing this assignment I can confidently say that I have produced a 1 minute(ish) 3D animation where a Zombie and a Robot arm interact with one another.

I would say that my strengths within this project has been shown mostly in the 3D stages of the process especially in the modelling and rigging stages as well as the generating my ideas. Within the modelling stages I was able to make a very convincing Zombie and robot arms, I went for the cartoon, 1950’s style which peer say I captured, and I was able to model both arms within the span of 2 and a 1/2 days, plus a peer mentioned that they liked the way my Zombie’s nails looked. With the rigging it was very easy to pick up after watching a couple of tutorials, I was able to make the skeleton for my Zombie arm and attach the skin to it, as well as apply controllers for both of them that turned out to be very easy to control. As for the animating of the project, it was very quick and simple to complete, although I did use up a lot of frames exceeding over 2000 which meant that I had to cut down on what I could include, even though when I rendered and edited the footage I still had about 10 seconds of space left that I could of use, perhaps I may of set up render wrong or that I didn’t set up the timeline correctly. And as for the idea stages I was able to come up with concrete story for the animation after a couple changes to the story and design of the characters.

As for my weaknesses within the project I would say they mostly shown within some of the animating as well as the planning for the animation. Like I had mentioned before I had exceeded the frame limit of my animation which was originally 1440 frames by 2000+ which wasn’t such a big deal because I knew within the editing I could of cut out any unnecessary parts out, but as I rendered the animation and whacked it in Premier Pro, the animation was very slow which meant I had to speed up the animation a little which resulted in the animation being 30-40 seconds long (before Editing) which meant I had a lot more time for me add the parts that I had to cut originally. As for the planning for the project it wasn’t as some of the previous projects although once again I was still a bit late when it came to starting modelling the arms, this was mostly because I didn’t to rush in with modelling until I was happy what my story was and what characters looked like, because at that point I will still not sure how I was going to model the Robot arm or even what it would look like, plus not knowing about the university being closed for two days on the last week was a pain as well. And lastly I think the Rendering could of gone better, what I mean by this is that when I began rendering I had it set up on 1 machine and left it, but after 2 hours I saw that the rendering was taking longer than I expected, so to speed thing up I set up similar renders on other machines that started and finished on different frames, which was a good idea until I realised that on the other machines I forgot to apply the background that was turned off at the time. It wasn’t a big deal because you couldn’t notice it in the editing fazes, but as I tried to mess with the brightness and contrast of the animation I notice the difference between that you can notice in some of the scenes, although it’s a slight difference it’s still something that I should remember not to do next time.

If I was to re-do this project I believe the first thing I would do is to include parts that were cut out in the final version of the animation because feel as if it would have made the animation lot more clearer to understand in the first viewing, as well as checking that I have set up the timeline of the animation so that when it comes to editing I don’t have to slow down or speed up any of the parts. Also I would make sure that when it comes to the finalisation of the designs that I would continuously check with peers and tutors to see if my ideas and design were good enough to proceed with, so that when I plan out my schedule, I won’t need to rush.

But before I moved onto that I had to first create the bomb and environment for animation first. The bomb was pretty straight forward to to model, but I ran into a few issues when making the fuse “pin” of the bomb. My original intention was to make hole through the top of he bomb so I can put a pin through it, so I may pull out during my animation, but whenever I put a whole through and smoothed the model out the hole would collapse on itself, despite how many edge loops I would put in the mesh. So instead of putting a hole in it I decided to change it to button instead to make it easier for myself.

After this was done and I quickly put together a simple environment, by manipulating some of the faces on a flat polygon to make hills, and using a big dome as the background of the environment. Once this was done I moved onto animating.

The animating was easy to get back into, all the controllers that I’d applied to the arms were easy to move and manipulate and putting everything else on a separate layer meant that would accidentally click on something else by accident like the floor. Although the Zombie hand proved that it was a lot more difficult to animate than the robot, as I had a lot more parts to deal with when interacting with the ball.

Here we have the rough storyboard of what my animation will look like. Depending on how many frame it’ll take me to animate this I may change the animation a little bit to save on frames.

So today I began and rigging both of my arms, and boy was it a long repetitive process. I did the Zombie first because I knew it would take the longest because of how many attributes I had to apply for each of the fingers. The process was pretty straight forward, it was simply moving how far you wanted the finger and then keying it so when you use the controller you have a a sort of path to how that finger will move, it was the same for the Robot but instead I only constrained the arm, because rigging would be pointless and a waste of time, especially for my animation seen as they won’t be moving anywhere.

With the rigging done all that’s left to do it model the bomb and environment that the animation will take place in, something that will probably take me the best of an hour to do.

So today I began to begin texturing my arms. At first I was going to use Mudbox to colourize my arms, and see what it was like to use it, but then dropped the idea because I didn’t really wanted to put much detail in my arms because it didn’t fit the theme of my animation, and the process was kind of pain in the ass because whenever it came to editing the UV of the fingers of my Zombie arm, I had to dissect them because of the nails having points on top one another which would make the UV unwrap spazz out (plus I’m lazy :P). So I decided to go with the easy route and give the arms simple textures, which will be good for the long hall because it means I quickly move onto rigging the arms, which is what I plan to start tomorrow.

In relation to the progression of my Zombie arm, I also finished modelling my robot arm, which took F@*$!ng forever!!! At the start modelling I was still unsure what my R-Arm will look like and how it would move. Eventually I came to a decision that I’m going make it look steampunky with rivets in the sides of the arm. The process was very long and I ran into more than a few problems, like selecting the wrong face, creating random vertex on accident, forgetting to parent the object together, as well as forgetting to re-position the axis controller for each object, but overall a success. I also decided to give the arm an extension so it can reach further when it plays catch with the zombie.

Hey it’s been a while hasn’t it? …Has it? …I don’t know… I don’t keep up with the Blog thing as much as I should do but hey ho. So during my absence of not Blogging enough about the Z&R Assignment I’ve managed to model my zombie arm YEEEEEY! It was the first time I had ever modelled a hand in any 3D package, and I think I did a very good job, especially with the fingers, but I think the knuckles look a bit off and some of the nails could use a bit more work. With the help of my tutors tutorials I managed to grasp the processes to make a hand in Maya.

Next thing to do is to move onto using Mud box the add texture to the model, I’ve not used it yet and I’ve heard it’s quite the challenge but I with the help with some tutorials I can get the handle it.

At the moment I’m kind of at a standstill when I talk about the story of my animation. I mean I’ve got several ideas of what I want to do but I’m not entirely sure whether or not I want to use them. And being me I’ve come up with another idea that I like more than the others. The idea is the zombie and robot arm playing a game of catch, where the robot will antagonise the zombie to point where the zombie will throw too hard and knock down a wall that will fall on top of the robot.

What I will take from this little short from Rooster Teeth, is obviously the idea of the guys playing catch, but also the gag where one of the friends are the unlucky one and are continuously getting hurt, something that I will apply to the zombie arm.

Here I have done some concepts for the robot arm that will be featured in my animation. So far I have taken inspiration from various of robot claws I can find so I can further understand how a robot arm will look and move, because so far I have created claws with two joints at the claw whereas most robot claws only have one. And because of my idea I having to also look at various stationary arms because my robot will not be moving.

Here I have done some drawings of what my Zombie arm will look like within my animation. I have taken some inspiration from the movie Paranorman and the game Plants vs Zombies, with having my hand very skinny and boney and have the tips of the fingers and thumbs are square, with broken fingernails. I’ve also looked at some images of different rotten flesh tutorials looking at some of patterns I could put on my hand. At the moment I may not have any rotten flesh on my hand but I may change my mind depending how quickly I model my hand.